Monthly Archives: July 2015

A few months ago in this space, I wrote about choosing novels to teach in a graduate course I’m offering this fall. I was convinced that novels were necessary because it’s a course on digital text-analysis, among other topics in the digital humanities. And because my exemplary critics Stephen Ramsay and Matthew Jockers (required reading for the course) focus on 19th- and 20th-century novels in their work.

Now I’m refocusing on two text types that are (arguably) extra-novelistic, at least in form: Samuel Pepys’s Diary, a daily record of his life between 1660 and 1669; and an anthology of sonnets, those 14-line poems made famous by Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and company.